Helping Adoptive Parents Understand the Role of Families of Origin: From the Viewpoint of an Adoptee

~ by Niels Hoogeveen

Like Suz Bednarz, I too struggled with the question to help adoptive parents understand the role of families of origin. Being very much opposed to the practice of adoption in general and its overly powerful industry in particular, why would I want to help those who feed that system with the money that makes the system so powerful in the first place?

Wasn't I placed out of my natural parents family just to eliminate their role in my life. So what source of information can I possibly be?

I know part of my family history, being adopted by the sister of my father, but that isn't the perspective on my family I was born to have.

My mother's family I never got to know, she died and with that, I have no longer an opportunity to find out what her role was in my life. I must assume she birthed me and I've been told she took care of me for the first year of my life, but those are cold facts, years after the deed of separation was done. I met my father and found out it was too little, too late. He showed no interest in me and in a role in my life and we haven't seen each other in fifteen years.

Not wanted enough in one family to be kept, I grew up in another family, that wanted me far too much. So much that I lived almost all of my childhood in service of their needs and insecurities. Growing out of that, it took me another twenty years of my life to explain my adoptive mother some of the sensitivities adoption invoked in me, while my adoptive father never got any of the message. So how can I explain (prospective) adoptive parents anything within the context of a single blog post?

My role in my adoptive parents life was to be the child they never had and it made me sick to play that part and was too afraid to do anything about it. Now I am just sick and tired of playing any role.

I don't want to sound disrespectful towards the people who set-up this blog and I admire their willingness to fight against the adoption industry's impact on child placement practices, but I cannot play a part in helping adoptive parents gain an understanding in the role of their child's family of origin. I've played mine in the years I lived with my adoptive parents and I'm done playing the part.